12 Rules for Life: Rule 2 Summary & Analysis

Peterson asks the reader to imagine a scenario where 100 people are prescribed a drug: one-third of them will never fill the prescription, and half of the remaining 67 won’t take the medicine properly, missing doses or stopping early. Peterson says that doctors tend to blame patients for noncompliance, while psychologists tend to blame doctors for not following up effectively with patients. In general, people are better about filling and administering medications to their pets than to themselves. Peterson looks to the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis to figure out why.

The Genesis account of creation appears to weave together two different literary sources. The first of these, known as the “Priestly” account, says that God created the world by speaking everything into existence. The second, or “Jahwist” account, focuses on the creation of Adam and Eve. To understand the first account, it’s necessary to understand certain ancient assumptions about reality.

Since the birth of modern science 500 years ago, it’s been difficult for us to understand ways of seeing that aren’t primarily scientific and materialistic. But people who lived during the time when many ancient cultural epics were written were more concerned about survival than about what would be regarded as objective truth today. Back then, reality, or Being, “was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.” It was concerned with subjective, lived experience. Suffering is one example—it can’t be reduced to something merely detached and objective. Our subjective experiences have more in common with novels or movies than with scientific descriptions.

Like scientific descriptions of matter, human experience can also be reduced to its constituent elements. These include chaos, order, and the process that mediates between the two—what’s called consciousness today. Peterson says that when people don’t deal properly with chaos and order, they despair. The third element, consciousness, is the only way out.

Chaos is where “ignorance” reigns; Peterson calls it “unexplored territory.” It’s where nothing is familiar or predictable, where things fall apart, the underworld found in fairytales and myths. Peterson identifies Chaos with the formless void in Genesis 1, from which God calls forth order. It’s also the unformed potential of our lives.

Order, on the other hand, is “explored territory.” It’s the structure that society, tradition, and biology provide; it’s “tribe, religion, hearth, home and country.” Within order, the world’s behavior matches our expectations, and things turn out as we wish. At the same time, order can become tyrannical and stifling, too.

Chaos and order aren’t objects; they’re things perceived as personified. In this regard, modern people are no different from their ancient ancestors—they just don’t notice. But we perceive what things mean just as quickly, or more quickly, than we perceive what they are. Human beings have always been social, which means that the most important things in their environment have always been personalities—and for a billion years, Peterson says, the personalities we perceive have been configured in the predictable forms of male and female. Like the categories of parent and child, the categories of male and female have been “deeply embedded in our perceptual, emotional and motivational structures.” Furthermore, the “reality” we contend with in the struggle for survival has much to do with other beings.

Peterson says that over millennia, human beings became more aware of and curious about what’s “outside” of what they currently understand—and not “representing objectively,” but “dealing with” that reality. But because humans are so social, they naturally used social categories to understand the unknown. And because our minds predate humanity itself, those categories actually trace back to the pre-human animal social world.

Order is symbolically associated with the masculine. This might be because human and much animal society has been primarily structured according to a masculine hierarchy. Chaos is symbolically associated with the feminine, perhaps because everything is born out of the unknown, or chaos. Women are highly selective about who they mate with, which has helped shape male competitiveness in turn. This male/female, order/chaos duality is reflected in many religious symbols and perhaps even in the structure of the brain itself.

Everyone instinctively understands order and chaos, Peterson asserts, even if they don’t know they understand it. When people begin to understand it consciously, lots of things begin to make sense. Knowing about order and chaos also helps you know how to act. We’re meant to “straddle that fundamental duality,” to be balanced. Peterson says balance means “to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure.” Every experience we live through is made up of both order and chaos—this is true for everyone, no matter where they’re from. Either too much order or too much chaos isn’t good. It’s not good to be too stable, because you won’t learn anything new, but it’s also not good to be overwhelmed by too much instability and change. The ideal position is “where the terror of existence is under control […] but where you are also alert and engaged.” That’s where a person finds meaning.

Peterson turns to Genesis and reminds readers that the book contains two creation stories. The “Jahwist” account details the creation of Adam and Eve more fully. According to this account, God placed Adam in a place called Eden, or Paradise, where he was forbidden to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God also created Eve as Adam’s partner. The two are naked and unashamed of that fact.

Suddenly, a serpent appears in the garden. Peterson thinks the serpent represents chaos, which even God can’t entirely prevent from entering the enclosed garden. And even if all such “snakes” could have been banished, they still would have remained in the form of “primordial human rivals” and intertribal conflict. And even if all of these could have been defeated, then the “snake” within the human soul—“the eternal human proclivity for evil”—would have remained. No wall or boundary can keep out this evil. If someone, like a parent, tries to keep all outside threats from children’s lives, then this only leads to another danger—infantilizing children and preventing them from growing into their full potential.

The serpent plays a trick on Eve, claiming that if she eats the forbidden fruit, she won’t die, contrary to what God has said. Instead, she’ll become God-like, in that she’ll have the ability to distinguish between good and evil. Eve does so, and she becomes “conscious.” Unwilling to tolerate a husband who doesn’t share consciousness, she shares the fruit with Adam, too. But as they “wake up,” Adam and Eve also notice that they’re naked. Peterson says that nakedness implies vulnerability and being subject to judgment. When Adam and Eve realized this, they felt exposed and afraid to stand before God, so they covered themselves and hid. Peterson says that anyone is afraid to stand before someone stronger, more beautiful, more “Ideal” than themselves.

That evening, when God is walking in the garden, He calls for Adam, who fearfully admits that he hid because of his nakedness. Adam also blames Eve and God, in turn, for putting him in this position. In response, God curses the snake, the woman, and the man, ultimately banishing them from the garden’s safety and “into the horrors of history itself,” where they will be required to work and struggle for survival. Peterson returns to the question with which he opened this chapter: why do people care for their pets and neglect themselves? The story of Genesis suggests that people know how flawed and contemptible they are and see an innocent, unselfconscious creature like a dog as more deserving them themselves.

There’s another layer to the Genesis story. Adam and Eve don’t just become aware of their nakedness and the necessity of work—they also come to know good and evil. Peterson says it took him a long time to figure this out, but eventually he understood what this meant. Unlike animal predators, human beings can be intentionally cruel. Because they know their own vulnerability to suffering, they know how to make other people suffer. This conscious desire to inflict pain is much worse than being a predator, since animals don’t inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. Peterson says this is the best definition of evil he’s come up with. Though it’s unpopular today, Peterson thinks this capacity to inflict suffering legitimizes the idea of “Original Sin.”

Given this capacity to do wrong, Peterson thinks it’s no wonder that people struggle to take care of themselves or others. If we look honestly at this darkness at the root of humanity, it’s easy to doubt whether human beings should even exist.

In Genesis 1, God creates an orderly paradise out of chaos by His divine Word. When He creates man and woman, He gives them the ability to do the same thing. Genesis 1 teaches that this Being God has created is good—humanity is good, even when that goodness is disrupted by humanity’s terrible actions. Even then, human beings retain a memory of paradise and long for it, whether they realize this or not.

When the original Man and Woman lived in harmony with God, they weren’t really conscious. In a way, then, they were less than they’d be after the Fall, because their goodness wasn’t earned; it was just given. They weren’t making choices. Peterson suggests that maybe it’s not our self-consciousness and awareness of our evil capacities that make us ashamed, but our unwillingness “to walk with God,” as symbolized by Adam’s hiding.

Peterson says that in the Bible, everything after the Fall is presented as part of a remedy for the Fall. But the meaning of that remedy is already found within Genesis 1: “to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good,” out of free choice. He adds that if we want to take care of ourselves, we have to have self-respect. But since we see ourselves as fallen creatures, we don’t.

While Peterson says that society is no longer as brutally violent as it was in ancient times, we do cynically believe that people are egotistical and only look out for themselves. Peterson suggests that, actually, many people suffer from the opposite problems of self-loathing and self-neglect. They might work to prevent other people’s and creatures’ suffering, but they believe they themselves should suffer. Peterson says that in Western society, people misinterpret the Golden Rule and Christ’s self-sacrifice “as a directive to victimize ourselves” for others. On the contrary, Christian teachings don’t actually mean accepting tyranny or letting ourselves be bullied, even by ourselves.

Peterson says he learned from Swiss psychologist Carl Jung that the Golden Rule and loving one’s neighbor aren’t actually about “being nice.” He also learned from Jung that these two things are “equations”—that is, they mean that a person should care as much for themselves as for others, or else one just ends up being enslaved, and other people end up being tyrants. Furthermore, Peterson says, people don’t simply belong to themselves: this is because our “Being” is connected to others’ being, so mistreatment of ourselves hurts others, too. Plus, the fact that we are made in God’s image, in some sense, means that we have inherent value.

Peterson finds it “miraculous” that people in crisis so often pull together to keep life going. In his own practice, Peterson encourages people to give themselves and others credit for their thoughtfulness toward their fellow human beings. He finds that people are so weighed down by the burden of Being that it’s remarkable they ever look beyond their own troubles. People deserve sympathy for living with vulnerability and suffering. This sympathy should balance out the contempt people feel for themselves and one another.

Everyone has something to contribute to the world. Therefore, everyone deserves some respect, and everyone has a moral obligation to take care of themselves—the same way they would take care of someone they loved. Everyone is deeply flawed, too, but an attitude of constant self-hatred isn’t helpful for anyone. Instead, everyone should “treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping”—not necessarily “what would make you happy” (after all, a child might be happy every time you give them a piece of candy). Rather, you should think about what’s truly good for you.

To do this, it’s important to know where you’re going and what your principles are, and what’s necessary for you to become a better person—and to help make the world a better place. You must start with yourself. It’s important to understand “your own individual Hell” before you can help the world at large to move toward Heaven and away from Hell. Doing this goes a long way toward making up for one’s misery and “sinful nature,” replacing shame with pride and confidence, like “someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden.”